Sunday 23 January 2022

The Handicraft Census In Perm Gubernia, Article III, Section VI - Part 6 of 10

The second largest number employed by buyers-up was in the felt-boot industry. The Sketch gave more or less no information on it. The handicraftsmen employed dozens of wage workers, but the nature of this employment was unknown. What was known was that the working conditions of these workers were extremely unsatisfactory. Those employed could endure no more than 15 years in such work, and suffered with consumption. The sanitary inspectors called for much larger workshops and factories to be built, so that the workers had a larger volume and flow of air. Lenin notes,

“One cannot help hoping that this recommendation will be acted upon, for it would promote technical progress by eliminating a host of middlemen and would pave the way for the regulation of working hours and working conditions; in a word, it would eliminate the most crying abuses in our “people’s” industry.” (p 429-30)

Similar terrible conditions applied in the bast-matting industry. The data showed that a merchant called Butakov had a factory in Osa that employed 180 workers.

Little information was provided in The Sketch on the iron-working industry, but an interesting description is found in Handicraft Industries in relation to Nizhni-Tagil.

“The manufacture of trays and other articles is divided among several establishments: forging, tinning, and decorating. Some of the handicraft masters have establishments of all these kinds, and are consequently manufacturers of the pure type. Others perform one of the operations in their own workshops and then give out the articles to handicraftsmen for tinning and decorating in their homes. Here, consequently, the uniformity of the economic organisation of the industry—both when the work is given out to be done in the home and when several detail workshops belong to one master—stands out very clearly. The handicraftsmen who act as buyers-up, giving out work to be done at home, are among the biggest masters (of whom there are 25) who have organised the most profitable purchase of raw material and the marketing of the product on a large scale; these twenty-five handicraftsmen (and they alone) take their goods to the fair or have their own shops.” (p 430-1)

This illustrated the process whereby the differentiation of those producers was taking place, in which a small number of larger producers were able to use that advantage to also dominate a larger number of smaller producers who become dependent on them, both for the supply of raw material, and for the ability to sell their finished product.

“In addition to them, the big “manufacturer traders” are also buyers-up; they exhibited their wares at the Factory Department of the Ekaterinburg Exhibition. The author of the book classes them under “factory-handicraft (sic!) industry” (Handicraft Industries, I, pp. 98-99). Thus, on the whole, we get a very typical picture of capitalist manufacture, interwoven in the most diverse and fantastic ways with small establishments.” (p 431)

That was also the case with the chest-making industry,

“It is organised as follows: a few big proprietors who own workshops employing wage-workers purchase the materials, partly manufacture the goods in their own workshops, but mainly give out material to small detailed workshops, subsequently assembling the various parts of the chest in their own workshops and sending the finished article to market. Division of labour—the typical condition and technical basis of manufacture—is widely employed in production: the making of a complete chest is divided into ten or twelve detailed operations each performed by different handicraftsmen. Thus, the organisation of the industry consists in combining detail workers (Theilarbeiter, as they are called in Das Kapital) under the command of capital.” (p 432)


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